Becoming a Teacher: Issues in Secondary Teaching

Becoming a Teacher: Issues in Secondary Teaching

Excerpt

If you are learning how to be a teacher, this book has been written for you. It has been written by a group of people who have two things in common. The first is that they have devoted most of their lives to education – teaching, researching or both. The second is that they have all worked in the Department of Education at King's College London. This unique and powerful combination has resulted in what you hold in your hands – thoughts, ideas, words, questions, answers, wit and wisdom.

Some time ago, a visit from Her Majesty's Inspectorate encouraged us to look critically at the amount of reading that King's students did during their PGCE year. For many reasons, including accessibility of libraries, the cost of books, and funding, the amount of reading that students did was much less than we thought appropriate. Looking around we could not find a textbook that addressed the issues that we knew concerned our students. So we wrote one ourselves — for internal consumption. It proved to be popular so, with the help of Open University Press, we produced, in 1997, a more polished version. The first edition proved to be popular too, and had to be reprinted. However, education changes rapidly and books date — even if many ideas remain valid over decades. We decided that a second edition could and should be written. The second edition was first published in 2001 and it has been even more successful than the first edition. Now, six years on, it is time for another edition.

This edition contains 28 chapters, two more than the second edition and five more than the first edition. There are new chapters on education for sustainability, school effectiveness and improvement, and education policy. There are 11 new contributors and many new ideas and issues. However, the overall philosophy of the book remains unchanged. This is not a 'tips for teachers' book, although some chapters do focus on technical issues. Each chapter is designed to give you some background in terms of, say, the historical context and to illuminate the key issues that you will be faced with every day. Some of the chapters should enable you to make sense . . .